Snow Apples (13 page)

My mother introduced us. She was Miss Gamon from the Welfare Department.

It seemed to me that we were all nervous and uncomfortable. Perhaps it was because Miss Gamon had to ask personal questions. Had my father a drinking problem? No, my mother answered. Had he been unfaithful? Well, yes, she admitted. My mother was embarrassed. I was furious at my father for putting us in that spot. And I hated Miss Gamon's blue gabardine suit, her long red fingernails and her smug superiority.

We did receive some money from the Welfare Department, and Miss Gamon visited us every month. Whenever she was in our house, I got out and stayed out until she had driven away in her little green car.

*  *  *

My father did come home for Easter. He was sitting at the kitchen table when we came in from school.

We knew he was home before we got to the house. As soon as the noise of the school bus had died down, we heard the angry voices coming up the road.

“You think you can walk in here as if nothing has happened, and we're supposed to greet you with open arms? No, Frank. Never again.”

“Now, Agnes. Don't be that way. You know—”

We had to go in sometime. We couldn't stand out on the back porch all afternoon.

Tom was the one, finally, to push open the door. We all went straight to our rooms.

None of the bedrooms had doors. It was one of the details that had been left until there was more money. I heard Tom playing softly on his harmonica, and from where I sat at my desk, I could see him sitting on the braided rug in the boys' bedroom, leaning back against his bed. Jim and Mike were building a glider, and curls of soft balsa wood piled up beside them.

I pulled out my geography homework from my looseleaf and began coloring the map of South America. Red for beef, brown for rubber, yellow for mining.

“Can you honestly expect, Frank, that I can feed the five of us on what little you send home? You can't be that daft! Some months, nothing. What am I supposed to do?

“You have the land. You can sell it,” he said quietly.

My mother was crying now. “My God in heaven! The only security we have, and you want me to throw it all away.”

“This owning land has gone to your head, Agnes. There's no talking to you since you got the land. You won't even let my name be on the title. What kind of wife is it who'd do a thing like that?”

“That's it. That's what's bothering you.”

My father put on his logical voice.

“After all, it was my money that bought the land and built the house. By rights.” And he paused as if to make his point. “Any lawyer will tell you the same thing. It should be in my name. There'll be no peace between us, Agnes, until the property is in my name.”

“Your money? Your money, was it? It was the money I saved from the government allotment checks. There are wives on this peninsula who spent every cent of their allotment checks on hair perms and trips to Vancouver, and then cried poor mouth. Your money!”

“Yes, my money.” My red crayon broke, dragging beef production past the borders of Argentina. “If I hadn't been in the air force in the first place, you would never have got the check. Would you?” He made it sound so plausible.

“Francis Xavier Brary! The shame of it! To twist things like that!”

“You'll never get another cent from me until that title has my name on it.”

“If I thought you would act decently,” my mother said in a more controlled voice, “I would put your name on it. But you won't. You never have. Why should I think you'd turn over a new leaf now? No, Frank. You can't pull the wool over my eyes again.”

“Oh, for God's sake, Agnes! You're talking nonsense now. Trust a woman to get hysterical, imagining things.”

There was a loud crash from the kitchen. A pot had been slammed down hard on the table.

“That's it, then,” my father said. “You'll get no support from me. And don't think the Welfare Department snooping around will matter two hoots to me. I can get a job anywhere. And if you catch up with me, I'll just move on.”

My mother began to shout. “The Welfare Department tells me you're living with a woman up there. If you weren't keeping her, you'd have more money to send home to your children and your wife.”

“There's no sense trying to talk to you, Agnes. When you get like this there's no reasoning with you.”

I wanted to go out in the kitchen and shake him. There were a few minutes of silence. I could hear my mother moving around the kitchen. The stove lid was lifted, dropped again.

Then, in a voice deadly serious, “Get out, Frank.”

My heart curled in a tight ball.

“Get out right now. And don't ever come back. I'll manage somehow without you. But I'll not put up with your lies and your cheating and your women. We'd be better off
if you were dead. May God forgive me for saying it. But it's true—” Her voice broke.

“If I go out that door, Agnes, I won't be back.”

“Go, then! For the love of Christ, go!”

I heard the back door open. Felt the cold draft. Heard the clear barking of Pep come from a distance, the sharpness of evening in his bark.

“And you wonder why I turn to other women,” my father said.

“Don't forget to take your suitcase.” My mother's voice was hard. “I don't want you coming back for any reason.”

The determination in her voice reminded me of her telling us, when we were younger, of how she had met our father. It had been at a dance.

“All the people I knew, they all warned me about Frank Brary. He had a bad reputation. But I wouldn't listen. I'd made up my mind. He was the one I wanted. And nothing would stop me.”

Now she had made up her mind again, and with the same fierce determination. She was finished with my father.

“R
EMEMBER ALL
the shooting stars last August, and how we used to wish on them?” I asked Nels.

We were down at the beach, our backs against logs, and we huddled close to each other for warmth. It was the first week in May and the evening was chilly at the water's edge.

He nodded.

“Are you sorry we left the dance early?” he asked.

“No. Especially when the fight broke out. That Arnie Olsen! Besides, it gives us more time to be alone.”

“So let's not waste it. Come here.”

“I am here.”

“No, like this...come down here, beside me. Here, let me put my jacket under our heads.”

“You're going to be cold.”

“Stop talking, and let me really kiss you.”

I broke away in a few minutes, but Nels was persistent. And later, when he looked at his watch and saw how late it was, I was the one who didn't want to leave.

“We've got to go,” he said. “Your mother will kill you.” He didn't know I was feeling almost sick with wanting him.

All the way up the trail the wanting grew. One of the large stumps at the side of the trail had hollows in it, and I stopped and leaned back into one of them. When Nels fitted his arms around me, I felt him grow hard against me. Without stopping to think, I hitched my skirt out of the way, straining to have him even closer.

“Oh, Sheila, don't do that.” He seemed shocked, but his voice had thickened, and I sensed the wanting grow in him, too. I kept moving myself until I felt him fit against me. He let one hand drop, and his hand fumbled between us against the skin of my inner thigh.

“Please don't stop, Nels.”

He stopped moving but stayed leaning against me. I could feel a throb where his skin touched mine.

“What can I do, Sheila?” His voice was almost a groan. “You want me to stop? I can't stop now.”

“I want you inside—”

“Oh, God. Don't say that.” His voice was pleading, although he held me even tighter.

But I had already freed one hand and pushed the elastic down and out of the way until I felt the rayon in a heap around my ankles. I stepped clear.

I heard Nels' sudden intake of breath, and then I felt a quick hurting that seemed to tear me. My knees gave way so that I partially collapsed. But Nels held me up.

I cried out with pain. But he didn't stop, and then when the pain lessened, I seemed to loosen, become drowsy. Melted with pleasure, mounted up with pleasure. Stayed there, held there. A sense of danger—or excitement—held while I teetered...and fell. Such a long way down—my head would crack when I hit. Instead I came down into soft deep water that folded over me, rocked me.

I opened my eyes. The trees were black lace against the sky. A full moon lighted up the woods, Nels' face. His eyes were closed, his face peaceful.

After that we forgot about time. I felt the springiness of moss under me and the pressure of twigs digging into my back. Once I noticed the shape of alder leaves, black against the moon.

But always there was Nels. The smell of his hair was grass drying in the summer sun. His hands were pale flowers, his back a long line over me. And his mouth was open and loving and tasted like petals.

All around us the woods were quiet. The night itself was a soft, dark country.

It was late—too late—when we finally checked the time. But, dazed and uncaring, we wandered up the trail.

The house was dark. My mother usually left the light on in the kitchen window. Quietly, I let myself in the kitchen door, and without stopping to wash or brush my teeth, I
tiptoed in the dark to my bedroom, undressed quickly and got into bed.

I was floating off to sleep, still feeling Nels' presence, when I heard my mother get up. The light went on in the kitchen. The sounds she made were purposeful and deliberate. I heard her open the back door and go out.

She was gone for over three hours.

I slept in short snatches, tight with tension. The window in my room was beginning to show light behind the thin white curtains when I heard the back door open again. Her footsteps, now tired, dragged across the kitchen, turned into her bedroom.

I heard her sit on the bed. Its protesting springs sounded short and distempered. Her shoes dropped to the floor, were pushed aside. I thought I heard a long sigh as she lay down. Birds were beginning to sing in the early morning light. They went wild when the sky turned rosy.

I found I could hardly breathe, and my mouth was dry. I dreaded the moment when I had to get up and face her. My heart was beating inside my chest, as out of control as the birds in the woods outside my window.

“A
FINE
THING
,” my mother said. “Traipsing in at two o'clock in the morning.” She was watching me while I filled my bowl with Sonny Boy cereal, her eyes glinting with anger.

“You think I raised you to be some sort of a tramp? A slut at sixteen?”

I couldn't answer. The early morning sunlight was shining in across the kitchen table. Last night seemed unreal. It didn't belong with the bowl of brown sugar, the rainbow that was refracted from the cut-glass salt and pepper shakers, or the clean housedress my mother wore.

“What have you to say for yourself?” But she didn't wait for an answer. “When I told the Bergstroms last night—or should I say, early this morning—that I would have no
more of it, they had to agree. You and Nels are to stop seeing each other. Or get married. One or the other.”

So that's where she'd gone—to Nels' house. He would hate that. And so would Mrs. Bergstrom.

My mother's voice went on and on. The words banged in my ears. My head hurt. I tried once or twice to answer her, but she didn't stop talking long enough to listen. I kept trying to swallow my porridge, but it seemed to stick in my throat.

I had never seen her in such a state. It was as if everything she had held back since that final fight with my father came pouring out at me. It was a flood of anger, bitterness and frustration, and I felt swamped by it.

I had to talk to Nels, to decide what we should do. Nels didn't call for me after school on Monday. On Tuesday I waited for half an hour after the school bus left, hoping he would come. Wednesday and Thursday I walked home, wanting each truck to be his. By Friday I knew something was terribly wrong.